


is it too late to come on home?

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Crying, Gen, Post-Battle, Spoilers for everything, The Consequences of Repressing Your Entire Emotional Scope For Ten Fucking Years, some suicidal ideation because lucretia has issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 19:37:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15177857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: The story is over, and now Lucretia is the last harsh note in the song.  Her captain still gives a damn, though.





	is it too late to come on home?

**Author's Note:**

> Okay listen, if you're waiting on the next chapter of _things we lost_ , I have it, it's done, I'm gonna post it, but also I got an ask on Tumblr and this scene physically forced itself out of my throat and inflicted itself on all of you completely without my influence, I'm so sorry.
> 
> Title is from the Florence + The Machine song "Long and Lost" because that's what's currently playing on my Spotify.

There is a celebration going on upstairs, has been for hours, but it’s inaudible down here.  The only sound here is the soft splash of Lucretia’s feet in the water—it’s still a couple inches deep, even though it’s started to evaporate in places and seep into the elevator shaft and there’s still almost a third of the tank’s glass mostly intact.  It’s a lot of water, really.  Fisher’s gone, taken his baby with him, and Lucretia walks forward until she’s close enough to touch the broken tank and tries to be happy about it.  That was always the agreement, that Fisher was free to go once the Hunger was defeated, once she had written the last page of this story.  Lucretia  _is_  glad, really, she is—she never wanted Fisher to be a prisoner, only ever kept him on mutual agreement.  It’s just...

She might have liked to say goodbye, is all.

Lucretia lets out a slow breath and does not cry.  She’s said goodbye to a lot of people in her long life.  One more jellyfish, one way or another, won’t tip the scales.

She looks around the room, the lights dim now that Fisher isn’t providing half the illumination.  She’s not looking  _for_  anything, not really, she’s just looking, because it’s a room to look at.  That’s what Lucretias and Directors do in rooms.  The last few hours, since the end of the fight, has largely been Lucretia coming down off the adrenaline rush, and since she finally crashed properly she’s mostly just been doing the things that Directors do on autopilot.  

Johann’s body has been collected, she notices.  Magnus’ mannequin form has not.  It’s hacked pretty well to bits in places, wooden splinters ranging from splinter-sized to almost as large as a small knife floating in the water, and it managed to acquire a slash down its face in the same place as Magnus’ scar.  That’s funny, Lucretia observes in a clinical sort of way, and when she laughs it sounds tinny and distant in her ears, like someone else laughing from a long way off.

When she stops laughing, the sound falls away all at once, not even an echo.  It makes her feel like a ghost, like her body died in the fighting and she’s just forgotten to go with it.

That’s a better story, she thinks, with the removed sense of narrative and character of the long-trained writer.  That’s the story she wrote in her head, when she tried to guess how this would go.  The youngest and most removed of the IPRE—the Seven Birds, she likes that, it has poetry—who betrayed her family to save the world, successful but killed in the process.  All the loose ends tied up neatly, cleaner than she ever dreamed.  Lup is back, her family is restored to each other, the world is saved, the Hunger is gone, the Light is gone, it’s perfect.  All except for Lucretia, the traitor, the monster under the moon base.

What does she do now?  She is Madame Director, she has buried herself under robes and gravitas and her unfamiliar face, but Madame Director isn’t needed anymore.  The things that Directors do still need to get done, but other people could do them, and the things that Lucretias do…

She’s not sure she knows how to do those, anymore.

Lucretia breathes in.  Lucretia breathes out.  Lucretia imagines gears in her chest, winding down, and wonders if maybe she died all the way back in Wonderland, and now she’s a mannequin too, a clockwork girl reaching the end of her timer.  Clockwork woman—she’s only just thirty-three, only just a hundred and thirty-three, only just fifty-three.  Somehow she still feels twenty-one and new to the multiverse; she feels older than the stone under her feet.

She’s not sure how long she stands there, her robes soaking up water, before the elevator dings politely behind her and slides open.

There’s a splash behind her as water rushes into the elevator, as feet move forward toward her.

“Lucretia?”

“Davenport,” she says vaguely.  Then she blinks, comes back to herself, and says, “Captain.”  She turns to see him, in the dim light and rippling shadows cast by the water.  He’s frowning down at his feet, three or four inches of water rather higher on him than on her, still dressed in the shirtsleeves and pants of his Bureau uniform with his red jacket over the top.  It’s a strange moment of dissonance, and his jacket clashes just as terribly as ever with his bright orange hair.

“You look good,” Lucretia says with an attempt at a smile. 

“You look old,” Davenport says bluntly, but it’s gentle, a little teasing, coaxing, even. 

Lucretia raises a hand to her face, feeling out the lines around her eyes and mouth, the way her cheeks are planed rather than rounded, the creases in her forehead.  It’s still strange to her.  She’s avoided mirrors, mostly—not out of vanity, more because she didn’t always like the person in the glass.  Maybe this should feel more natural, looking closer to her age rather than being perpetually just out of childhood, but it just feels disorienting and unfamiliar after so long at twenty-one.  It feels like she’s touching a mask, now more than ever.  Her body doesn’t feel real.

“I do, don’t I.”  She drops her hand and folds them behind her back, the formal pose she made for herself back when her hands still itched for a pen every time she was at rest.  “Why aren’t you celebrating with the others?”

Davenport shrugs, hands in his pockets.  “Needed a minute from the noise.  I’m not used to it anymore.”

“Of course,” Lucretia says quietly.  Her next breath shivers in her chest.  “I don’t think this is the best place, though,” she says, trying to sound amused.  “Magnus saw fit to flood the joint.”

“Sure,” Davenport says, looking at the tank.  He looks like himself again, the quicksilver brilliance back in his eyes, and he gives an idle spin of his hand that sends a globe of soft white light the size of his fist into the air to brighten the room.  “Damn,” he adds, looking over the wreckage of the tank with something close to admiration.  “He did that with an axe?”

“I believe he tried to flood the Hunger out of the room,” Lucretia says.

“That’s my boy,” Davenport says, in the same tone of tired exasperation that she remembers, and it’s perfect, he’s perfect, he’s exactly what he should be and she didn’t ruin him forever.

The thought comes unbidden and the shiver in her chest bursts out of her lips as a cracked sound before she can stop it.  Davenport looks up in alarm, and she presses a hand over her mouth, shaking her head.  Something is trying to claw its way out of her ribs, and she sucks in a deep breath, then another, and another, trying to quell it.

“I’m so sorry,” she finally says, and her voice is almost steady for the words.  “I know you’re angry with me, and you’re right to be.  I had no idea what—” and there it goes, there goes her voice, she needs to be able to speak and she just _can’t._   Lucretia swallows and forces her throat to cooperate.  Her clockwork will have to keep ticking over for a few more minutes.  “I didn’t realize what taking the IPRE would do to you.  I had a life for you here, I did, I was going to—I was—”

“Lucretia,” Davenport says with alarm.  “ _Breathe_.”

And oh, that’s why the room is lurching, isn’t it?  Lucretia means to breathe, because that’s what Lucretias do, she was given an order by her captain and she needs to follow it, but she can’t drag in a breath. 

Her voice is ragged when she whispers, “I’m so sorry.  I thought I was careful, I was _so_ careful, I—I didn’t mean to, I didn’t, I tried to find what I did wrong and I just _couldn’t_ , I don’t know what I did wrong.” 

She’s babbling, she notes distantly.  Trying to get a decade of apologies out now, in this moment, because—because she hasn’t spoken a single one in all this time and they’re drowning her from the inside out.  He wouldn’t have understood, before, and it would have upset him to be so confused, so she kept them behind her teeth and grew sick on them.

There are more apologies piling up already, but when Lucretia opens her mouth to let them out, all that escapes is a cracked sound like a motor about to wind down.  She presses her hand over her mouth again and tries to swallow down the rush of words, tries to breathe and steady herself and pull Madame Director back around her like a cloak.  She needs to get a handle on herself.

This is unfair of her, this is so hideously unfair of her.  Her motives were good, the ultimate outcome was ideal, her plan was their ticket to victory and she did the best she could to protect everyone in the meanwhile, but _she_ is the traitor.  It is so heartless of her to ask for forgiveness now, for a betrayal of that scope.  It is monstrous to seek comfort for this, like a little girl lost in the dark, monstrous to want to be hugged and told she has done well by the person she has hurt the most. 

Because that really is Davenport, isn’t it?  Even taking Lup—a terrible thing, and she cried while she rewrote their memories, but it didn’t _destroy_ anyone.  Taako may never speak to her again, and she won’t blame him, but what she did to her captain, to the man who protected her and encouraged her and taught her how to fly the ship properly after the Judges so that she would never be lost again…that’s truly unforgivable.

Lucretia strangles a sob before it can escape, and it slips stillborn from her lips in a gasping sigh.

Davenport looks up at her in the white light of his orb, his eyes dark and solemn, and there’s an expression on his face that makes her feel like she’s about to fly apart into a thousand pieces, a thousand selves, just to have some way to hold the ache in her chest without dying.

Gods, please let her clockwork stop soon, she can’t take this, Lucretia thinks wildly.  She has everything she’s craved for ten years, for over a century—her family, saved from the dark and whole and together—and it’s killing her.  After surviving so much, so many deaths, so many ends of so many worlds, this victory will be the thing that finally puts a stop to her long, long life, because it is so clear that this story is perfect except for her and she can’t stand it.

She wants Davenport to curse her, to tell her it’s all going to be okay, to call her a monster, to touch her hair like he used to, gentle and a little awkward and fond.

Lucretia’s ears are ringing so loudly she doesn’t know if Davenport is speaking to her or not, she doesn’t even know if she’s still stumbling through her endless apologies, and so the feeling of a hand closing around hers is a shock.  Gnomes are small, but their fingers are long and clever and strong, and when Davenport grips her hand, she fumbles to squeeze back. 

“I’m so sorry,” she hears herself say again—for this, for now, for shaking herself to pieces in this flooded room and demanding this from him.  The words mangle against the palm still pressed to her mouth.

Davenport tugs on her hand, and this time, she responds automatically to the familiar motion and drops to her knees so sharply that she thinks she feels something crack.  It might be a kneecap.  She’s not sure if she cares.  The water immediately begins to soak eagerly through the fabric of her robes, into the soft dress pants underneath, and she doesn’t care about that either.

Lucretia is just above eye-level with him, now, kneeling in the water.  All three humans on the ship had been—are—so tall, all of them to a one at least six feet, and Davenport is average for a gnome, just under three.  He still has to reach up to pull the hand away from her mouth.

It’s only then that she hears him, finally.

“—right here, Lucretia.  You’re going to be okay, take a deep breath.  We’re all fine.  I’m right here.”

It’s a familiar reassurance, a soft spiel she’s heard and given dozens of times.  A hundred years of dying again and again is a long time to learn how to talk someone out of a panic attack.

Lucretia starts laughing, a high, wild sound that makes Davenport stop talking abruptly, still holding onto one hand by the wrist and the other in a reassuring clasp.  She tries to stop—he looks worried about her, and who wouldn’t be.  She’s losing her mind.

“I—I—I—”  She has to pause for another fit of laughter, and it’s this one that makes her aware that she’s crying, has been for some time by the feel of it.  Davenport looks like he’s considering slapping her, or else going to find someone with a sleeping spell on tap.  It might help, honestly.  It’s been over a week since she slept for more than an hour at a stretch.  It’s been almost three days since she slept at all.

“Lucretia,” Davenport says when her laughter subsides again, and now he drops her hands to catch her face, steady pilot’s hands holding her still so that she has no choice but to look at him.  It kills the lunatic desire to laugh, swift and merciless.  “What’s _wrong_?”

“I killed you,” she whispers.  “I thought I was doing the right thing—it was the only thing I could think of.  And I was so sure I had protected all of you, and then—and then I killed you.”

“You didn’t kill me,” Davenport says, dropping his hands to her shoulders.  “You didn’t kill any of us.”

_How do you know_ , Lucretia almost demands.  She doesn’t, though, just shakes her head, slow and blank, and tries not to let another sob escape.  The water is so cold she’s shaking, or maybe it’s just her, shivering and trembling like she’s about to fall apart at the seams.

How does she beg for forgiveness, when she would do it again?  Watching them all die slow and awful from grief was worse than this.  At least now only one person has to live with the guilt.

This would all be so much tidier if she wasn’t here.

She doesn’t realize she’s said that part out loud until Davenport shakes her—hard.

“Don’t you fucking _dare_ ,” he says fiercely, and then he steps forward and grabs her in a tight hug.  It’s unusual, for him, he’s not given to displays of physical affection, but he doesn’t show any flicker of uncertainty, just wraps his arms around her shoulders and squeezes with all his strength.

Lucretia is such a monster that she hugs him back without a moment’s hesitation.  She doesn’t deserve this, she thinks to herself as she wraps both arms around Davenport’s ribs and clutches at the familiar cloth of his IPRE jacket.  She shouldn’t ask this of him, she thinks as she presses her face into his shoulder. 

She does it anyway.  She’ll hate herself later, maybe, but right now, she’s too selfish, too self-absorbed, to do anything but cling to him.

She’s spent so long repressing the first real sob that she expects it to hurt when it finally fights its way out.  She’s right.  So does the second, and the third, and the fourth, until Lucretia’s crying harder than she has since they first realized how absolutely, utterly stranded they were, cut off from their home plane forever.  Davenport had given her a hug then, too, had let her cry on him, had pressed a hand against her skull below the pouf of her white ponytail.  Now, he smooths a hand over the short crop of her hair and Lucretia feels a rush of longing for her lush curls, for the feeling of someone playing with her long hair, like she hasn’t felt in years.  It’s a tiny thing, her only vanity all those years going from world to world, but it makes her cry harder, until she’s worried she might be sick.

By the time she manages to fight down the tears and the selfishness and the wailing little girl in her chest, Lucretia’s head aches, and she wants to sleep for a year.  Longer, maybe.  She wants to sleep until she’s twenty-one again.

Sitting back on her heels and feeling the water start to soak up to her thighs, she scrubs at her face and tries to compose herself.

“I’m sorry,” she says, more level this time for all that her voice sounds absolutely _ravaged_.  “I shouldn’t have done that.  I—I’m just tired, it’s made me erratic.”  It’s the polite script of Madame Director, any time she startles at a flash of red or barks at someone for some minor infraction.  “I’m quite all right, now.”

“Nice try,” Davenport says.  “You’re not a good liar.”

“I’m a wonderful liar,” Lucretia disagrees wearily, and rests her weight more heavily on her heels, resisting the urge to bury her face in her hands.  She folds her trembling fingers together in her lap and says, “I shouldn’t keep you.  I’m sure the others have missed you by now.”  She has no idea how long it’s been, whether that’s remotely true, but it sounds good, so she says it.

Davenport squints at her like she’s a particularly dangerous lab specimen.  “Lucretia,” he says, a thread of stern command entering his tone, and oh, it’s so blissfully _nice_ to have the weight of that off her shoulders, just for a moment, to have someone else giving the orders.  “We’re going to have a talk about what you did,” he continues in that same captain’s tone, sharp and impossible to ignore.  “We’re not happy about it.  But we don’t—we don’t want you _gone_.  We just got you _back_.”

The words hurt more than any blow she’s ever taken, they hurt even more than Taako’s condemnation earlier because she was _ready_ for that, she knew the moment she blacked out the first three letters in her journals, _L-U-P_ , that Taako would hate her forever, she had ten whole years to brace herself.  She’s not—

She’s not _ready_ for this.

“Captain,” she says again, and her voice has gone thin and young and _lost_ , not at all the calm and confident thing she has tried so hard to cultivate.  “You can’t—”

“Respect your elders, and don’t tell me what to do,” Davenport says dryly, just like he always has, and Lucretia hiccups into a laugh that surprises her almost as much as crying had.  He holds out a hand to her and says, “You’re drenched.  Come on, let’s get you some dry clothes.”

“I’m older than you now,” she says, because she can’t think of anything else.

“You absolutely are not.”  He’s still there, still holding out his hand like she’s allowed to take it, and so she does, puts her hand in his and stands, slowly.  Her robes are soaked almost to her waist, so heavy they threaten to pull her back down, but she stands anyway, and lets her captain lead her out of the basement of her self-made prison, and back into the light.

**Author's Note:**

> Just think, you too could send me an ask saying that something would kill you and get 3K of murder weapon in response.


End file.
